


A Cabin In The Woods

by leiascully



Series: All The Choices We've Made [6]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Cabin Fic, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Monster of the Week, On the Run, Self-Reflection, X-Files OctoberFicFest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-04
Updated: 2017-11-04
Packaged: 2019-01-29 05:30:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 28
Words: 13,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12624297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: Mulder and Scully, on the run, stay for a while in a cabin in the mountains in Montana.  A series of interlacing vignettes.





	1. Barefoot

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: post-S9  
> A/N: Written during the X-Files OctoberFicFest. Set in the timeline first introduced in [I Ain't Afraid Of No Jersey Devil](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8481946), although the details may not line up exactly. I borrowed a lot of prompts from [Inktober](https://pearwaldorf.tumblr.com/post/165955415212/spymastery-as-i-mentioned-doing-just-yesterday), but not all of them. There are some inconsistencies in tense between the vignettes, but I just left those in situ.  
> Disclaimer: _The X-Files_ and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this work and no infringement is intended.

The cabin is (when she thinks back on it, in the tumult of later) one of her favorite places on the roster of hideaways they used during those years on the run. 

It was late September when they reached Montana, wending their way through the mountains. Mulder’s network of true believers were nothing if not prepared, and their generosity surprised her consistently. On the second day of October, she woke up to a world traced with frost. She slipped out of bed, leaving a pocket of warmth under the down comforter. Mulder murmured in his sleep and she laid her hand on his back to soothe him. She had kicked off her socks in the middle of the night, heated through by the furnace of Mulder’s body, and she shivered as her bare feet touched the floor. The pine boards had been sanded to satiny softness. She glided across them on the way to her slippers. They had indulged themselves at the outdoor outfitters. Her long underwear was a breath of heat against her skin, thin and silky. She crossed her arms under her breasts and went to turn on the coffee maker. 

There was a woodstove in the corner, although the gas stove worked just fine. Semper paratus, she thought. The wind whistled in the flue of the fireplace, wafting heat from last night’s embers into the room. She wrapped herself in a wool blanket and considered the juxtaposition: big-bellied woodstove, handwoven blanket, buckskin slippers lined with fleece, handmade chair, all rubbing elbows with a sleek television, a coffee maker with six modes and a frother, and a security system that made the Hoover Building look like a playhouse. 

The air in the house smelled like frost. They had kept the heating off thus far; only the nights were really chilly, and then they shared each other’s heat. She spent the day in lined jeans and big sweaters, taking comfort in her lack of artifice. In the wild, they needed to be no one but themselves. She felt some days like she was forgetting even her name. The two of them didn’t need names. They had passed that point years ago. She knew who he was in relation to him, and she could feel himself recalibrating himself as she shifted position. She had been a physicist, a doctor, a special agent, a partner, a mother: now she was just herself, in the woods, stepping from a hot shower into the steam of Mulder’s arms or hiking on faint trails until she could feel every sinew. 

She opened the fridge. The cold inside it smelled different than the chill of the house. She took out a stick of butter, cut it into a bowl of flour, baking powder, buttermilk, and salt, and preheated the oven as she dropped biscuits onto a tray. She had learned this from her mother, for those special occasions when her father was home from the sea. She hadn’t done it by herself before this; Will had been too young, and she and Mulder had never had the opportunity. Her father had liked the precision of rolled biscuits, but she didn’t have the patience when it was only the two of them, and the crags of the drop biscuits held more jam. While they baked, she set thick bacon sizzling in a pan and then cracked eggs into the fat. Mulder padded up behind her and wrapped his arms around her, nuzzling through her loose hair to the nape of her neck as she flipped the eggs.

“Did you ever imagine this?” he asked, his voice hardly more than a whisper.

“No,” she said, “but I like it.” She shifted the eggs to the plate with the bacon and pushed the pan out of the way before she turned to face him.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Good morning,” she said. “You missed the sunrise.”

“I don’t think I did,” he said softly, gazing at her.


	2. Compliment

Scully took the biscuits out of the oven and slid them onto the cooling rack. Mulder picked one up immediately, breaking off bits that steamed as he popped them into his mouth.

“You’re too old for me to warn you to be careful,” she said.

“I hope that’s never true,” he told her. “They’re too good not to dive right in.”

“No seven-year waiting period?” she teased.

“I would have dove into you any day, Scully,” he said, wrapping his arms around her again. His stubble rasped against her neck as he kissed her ear.

“That is much appreciated,” she said, moving her body against his, “although not entirely grammatical.”

“These are much appreciated,” he said, reaching for another biscuit as she divided the eggs and bacon between two plates. He got the jam and more butter from the fridge. She still hesitated sometimes, reaching for things like butter and bacon, but between the frost in the air and hiking the boundary and chopping wood, she needed the calories these days. They both ate hungrily.

“You’re a good cook, Scully,” he said as he sopped up the last of his egg yolk with the remnant of a biscuit.

“Thank you,” she said.

“How did I not know that years ago?” he asked.

“Maybe you’re not the hotshot investigator you think you are,” she teased.

He pretended to consider it. “I don’t think that’s it.”

“We never cooked in DC,” she said. “There wasn’t time.” She had cooked for herself from time to time, when she needed the solace of her mother’s meatloaf, her great-aunt’s colcannon, Missy’s favorite peanut butter cookies, but all the recipes she loved were scaled for a family, and she had always tired of the leftovers before she finished them. She had given up: it was too depressing to force herself to eat the things she loved.

“I’m glad I know now,” he said. 

She looked at him across the table: his warm eyes, his lips glossy with butter, his hair still disheveled from sleep. Here they were, eating her mother’s biscuits, and Maggie Scully had learned them from her mother, and she from hers. How many biscuit recipes had risen in the oven of this cabin? How many biscuit recipes had crossed these mountains? How many had drifted on the wind past the trees that became the boards that her feet glided across? Why did she feel connected to everything here, in the middle of nowhere? 

“I’ll do the dishes,” Mulder said, gathering them up. Maybe he felt it too, the tug and release of history. She loved him just the way he was and was grateful for the shift in him, the way he cared for her and the space they shared. 

“Thanks,” she said.

“Only fair,” he said. “One of these days I’ll teach you to make latkes, Scully.”

More traditions. More stories, more families. More points of light in the dark, flickering but brave. She wrapped her hands around her coffee mug (local pottery, clay from time immemorial shaped by hands that had learned from artisans who had worked the same way for generations uncounted) and drank deeply while Mulder ran hot water in the sink and the lavender lemon scent of their dish soap mingled with the scent of breakfast and the woodsmoke of the embers. Grace notes, she thought, in a life somehow filled with grace.


	3. Warmth

In the cabin, they sat together on the couch in front of the fire. Scully eased her feet out of her slippers and stretched her toes toward the flames, yearning toward the heat of them until she slid gently off the couch to the floor, where she leaned against Mulder’s legs. He handed down her glass of wine and traced her cheek with the backs of his fingers as he sat back up. 

“We should have done this years ago,” she murmured.

“No white picket fence,” he said, “no Irish setter.”

“Nobody but us,” she said. “That’s all I need anymore.”

“Ah, Scully,” he said. “You know exactly what a paranoid conspiracy theorist loves to hear.”

“The culmination of years of intense and in-depth study, mostly involving things you didn’t want to hear,” she said, swirling the wine in her glass and peering at the fire through the ruby depths of it. "Negative stimuli.”

“No stimulus delivered by you could ever be negative,” he told her. Mulder ran his fingers through her hair, gently unsnarling a few tangles, and idly began to braid it, his fingers weaving order out of disarray. She hummed in her throat and relaxed against his shins, one hand patting his foot. 

“I always forget you know how to do this,” she said.

“Me too,” he said. 

She felt the hollow of all the thoughts she purposefully wasn’t thinking like the space left by a pulled tooth: her dreams had been rooted so firmly and it had ached so much to slam the door on them. But hope was easily impacted over years of disappointment, and the abscess would have poisoned the both of them. It might have taken her over. She was happier without those hopes, although it didn’t mean she didn’t see redheaded children in her dreams as she lay in Mulder’s arms.

She closed her eyes and felt the flicker of the fire against her skin. Her eyelids glowed.

Outside the sky was infinite, bone-cold black scattered with the far-flung possibilities of stars. She had reduced her universe to this man, this place, this circle of light.

It was enough.

For now, it was enough.


	4. Fallen

She had never lived anywhere before that the boundaries of the property had to be walked, the fences checked. Fortunately the acreage wasn’t overwhelming. Mulder’s conspiracy theorist friend hadn’t bought the whole mountain. It only took half a day to circumnavigate the acres of forest and field. She and Mulder had gone together at first, wiring bits of fence back together and checking the batteries in the small cameras the property owner had put up in case of special forces, genetically modified wolves, or Bigfoot sightings. Now she liked to go by herself at least once a week. There was a freedom in it. She loved Mulder desperately, still marveled at the miracles that had brought them back to each other, but living in a house not much larger than their basement office had been was a challenge for both of them sometimes. She liked the fresh pangs of longing that a few hours’ solitude brought her, the hunger for him that began to gnaw at her, the way the turbulence of her thoughts settle to still reflection when he wasn’t always at the front of her mind. 

She carried a small pack filled with survival essentials (matches, flashlight, a knife, bear spray, satphone, toilet paper, foil blanket, first aid kit) and wore sturdy boots. She’d learned how to use wirecutters and the most secure way to twist the fences back together. She carried a guide to edible plants and had returned from various excursions with walnuts, chestnuts, hazelnuts, persimmons, lingonberries, plums, sea buckthorn, and apples. They had groceries delivered to the end of the driveway, but she felt better knowing that she could find sustenance in the woods. Hiking had made her stronger, more perceptive, more resourceful, had developed all the things she liked most about herself. It was a nice change from her usual interactions with the underground world of Mulder’s contacts, where she’d always been the cranky, deluded representative of the sheeple.

Today she got up before Mulder, ate toast with peanut butter, and packed her water bottle and a sandwich along with one of the apples she’d found (they were small and misshapen but sweet). She put on heavy wool socks and laced her boots snugly. She left a note propped against the coffee maker - walking the boundary, back later - S. The morning air was crisp. She adjusted the straps of her pack over her jacket and set off, walking stick in hand. 

There was snow under some of the trees as she hiked up into the foothills, following the barbed wire of the fence up the mountain. Her body warmed quickly and she unzipped the top of her jacket. Her breath made clouds in the air, proof of her passage. The sound of her footfalls was the loudest noise in the woods, layered over the breeze in the trees and once in a while, the call of a bird. At the beginning of their stay at the cabin, she had found this difficult and her muscles had burned with effort. Now it was easy despite the steepness of the slope. 

The ground was thick with fallen leaves. She kicked through them for the childish pleasure of it, turning over the glossy slick sides and finding the occasional slug. It was a beautiful day until she stepped on the wrong pile of slippery slushy leaves and skidded in the mud hidden underneath. She flung out her arms and her stick trying and failing to catch herself, and tumbled down the side of the hill, rolling over and over until her hip slammed into a tree. She caught her breath and cried out at the impact, swearing into the silence of the woods. 

Pain shot through her as she struggled away from the tree and back to her feet. She was covered in mud and leaves, twigs tangled into her hair. She picked a slug off her shoulder and did a quick survey of herself: little chance of broken bones, 100% probability of bruising, skin deep or deeper. 

There was a sliver of ice in her soul. She could have died, might have hit her head instead of her hip. Instead, she was whole enough to limp back to the cabin. She prayed, quickly and quietly, sending her thanks into the blue sky above. She had forgotten, for a while, the architect of all this loveliness, as she wandered in the desert of her sorrow and her isolation. 

Scully levered herself up slowly with the help of her stick (she had landed on it - she expected a long stripe of blue-black across her ribs for her troubles). Her water bottle was dented and her sandwich was flat, but she would make her way home.


	5. Water

It rains one day, dripping down all morning onto the slush of last week’s snow, carving out channels for itself so that it can flow freely. It’s only just warm enough to rain. The red needle of the outdoor thermometer hovers in the high thirties. Scully sits out on the porch, wearing a fisherman’s sweater she found at the Goodwill that’s two sizes too big for Mulder and her most beat up jeans. She feels faded, half worn through at the places where she meets the world. At least her snow boots are waterproofed. Her feet are warm and her fingers and nose tingle with cold. She pulls her hands into her sleeves and crosses her arms tightly across her chest. It feels comforting and bleak all at once to sit here with her feet up on the low pine table and her head resting against the wooden slats of the rocking chair.

Mulder gives her space, working on something inside the cabin. She takes a deep breath of mountain air, rain and frost and mud and pine. She fills her lungs with it until her ribs ache and holds her breath for just too long. Exhaling isn’t quite enough relief. She breathes deeply until she starts to feel the mild dizziness that indicates hyperventilation. Her sternum feels stretched; she presses both fists to her chest. She wonders when pain started making her feel more alive. She should probably talk to someone about that, when they get back to civilization. 

Past the eaves of the porch, the rain sheets straight down, sounding as if it has aspirations of sleet. She can hear the snow yielding and slumping, whispering its sorrow as it goes. Drop by drop, water will wear away this mountain.

She knows the way the mountain feels. Grief has worn its own hollows in her soul. Now it pools in familiar places and erodes the soft spots inside her so that the rills rush faster, deeper, wider. She wonders if one day she will wake up a canyon, a chasm, only open air where her self used to be, and the falcon turning and turning in the widening gyre. She wonders if Mulder feels the same way.

Air and earth, water and fire: all things in their season. One day she will be dust, and this mountain will be dust, and the water will wash them both away, mingled with every particle of ash and smoke from the atmosphere. In a strange way, that’s comforting. From star stuff to earth, and on into eternity. 

The pines are dark, the bare birches sodden between them. She closes her eyes. An icy tendril of damp breeze caresses the thin skin of her eyelids. This time when she breathes, the dirt and pine scent is perfume, and her chest doesn’t ache.

Time erodes. Time heals. She sits on the porch in the stillness of the wilderness and lets herself be moved.


	6. Searching

She wakes up alone, adrift in the tangled covers. Scully sits up, pulling the blanket tighter around her. Being together isn’t a fairy tale: Mulder still has his insomniac nights, despite the comfort they find in each other. She’s more used than she’d like to be to waking up without him next to her. 

Under the bedroom door, she can see a faint blue glow, and she knows there isn’t any moon. In the city, she never knew what the moon should look like from one night to another. It wasn’t as if the moonlight made it to the streets; it was subsumed a hundred feet up into the hazy brightness of the city of the city. The only thing that ever saw the moon was the city’s waterways: the river, the reflecting pool, the ripples around the Jefferson monument. Here she always knows, because there are nights that are so luminous that they pull the curtains against the gleam, and some nights that are so dark she can sense the alertness building in the back of her mind, ancient survival instincts revived.

She knows what he’s doing. He’s hunched over his laptop, a finger of scotch in a tumbler next to him that he might not even finish, searching for their son. He is combing any open adoption records, emailing the appropriate authorities to ask to have sealed records unlocked, sifting through any data he can find on unusual expense records by child services employees. He’s convinced they can protect William, that together they’ll be fine.

She sighs and gets out of bed, shoving her feet into her slippers and wrapping a thick robe around herself. When she touches his shoulder, he flinches.

“Mulder,” she says. “Come back to bed.”

“He’s out there, Scully.” His voice is hoarse.

“I know he is,” she says. 

“I can find him. I just need more time.”

“Please stop,” she says, and he goes absolutely still under her fingertips. “Please stop. We can’t do this now.”

After a long pause, his hand drops from the keyboard and rises to cover hers.

“One day, Scully,” he says.

“One day,” she agrees. “When the time is right.” She doesn’t know when that will be. She doubts her heart will ever be less raw. The wounds from losing Emily have never healed. She bears the memory of her children like a scar, the kind that rips open again under pressure and never loses its livid roughness. 

He bows his head, defeated, closes the laptop, and knocks back the scotch. His lips burn gently against hers when she leans down to kiss him, the last drops of liquor sealing them together. She takes his hand and leads him back to the bedroom. She draws the curtains closed on the darkness outside: there is enough darkness within. She doesn’t need the wild night calling him as she reminds him what sparks they make together, what light they create between the two of them.

They will need that light to find any answers. She knows it, cups it in the hands of her mind like the last ember of a Yule log, that end of one thing, that promise of another year, and of bright days to come.

When she kisses him, when they move together, the wool blanket crackles with static, constellations there and gone, stars that they’ve always been able to navigate by.

One day, she dreams. One day, their fixed star will appear, and their son underneath it, limned with ancient light and unafraid of the darkness.


	7. Impasse

He has wanted to go. She can feel his restlessness: he tosses beside her in the bed, fidgets with a pen during the day, taps his toes or his fingers at dinner. She wants to stay. She is finding some sort of peace here, some unanticipated stillness inside her bruised and shivering heart. 

They are at an impasse. Neither of them has voiced their wishes. She can tell by the things he puts away that he is ready to pack their bags at any moment. She keeps the place tidy too, but becomes even more ingrained in her routines until her day is a path worn deep and smooth, the same circuit from morning to night. They make breakfast, she hikes the fence or helps clean the house, she reads her medical journals, they make dinner and watch a movie or listen to the radio or read together at opposite ends of the couch as their feet share the middle cushion. 

In an abstract way, she misses Monica and her mother, Doggett and Skinner. But she has spent so much more time missing Mulder. The reservoir fills slowly but surely, restoring that part of her to equilibrium, but there are other absences that can never be redeemed, not in this world, not by mortal means. Something about the cabin, the mountains, the quiet makes all of that a little less unbearable. The wilderness requires nothing and everything of her in a way that makes her feel whole and competent and insignificant all at once. She remembers the feeling from church when she was younger. She has not felt it for many years. She wasn’t aware how much she missed it. It isn’t something she can explain to Mulder, whose worshipful gaze turns upwards, but toward mysteries she will never fathom.

Scully knows they’re running out of time, if they are to leave. They have snow tires, chains, an SUV with four-wheel drive; still, the mountains become impassable for weeks at a time, the roads too sloped and slippery to cross. They have been stockpiling flour, sugar, butter, all the essentials. The next property over (close enough to walk, although it will take nearly as long as checking the fence) has chickens and cows, and whoever owns this place has a hydroponic garden in the basement that she has seeded with herbs and vegetables, crops she suspects it has never seen. 

“Snow in the forecast tonight,” he says one day. “Couple of feet or more.”

“We’ve got wood to last a while,” she says. “Gas for the generator in case the solar panels get covered. Plenty of food.”

He chews on his lip. She just watches him. Making no decision is still making a decision. 

“I’ll go split a few more cords of wood,” he says at last. 

“I’ll help you,” she says. She likes to watch the way the muscles in his back work; she likes feeling the work in her own muscles when she swings the ax, something she never expected to be doing.

“Maybe when the snow melts, we can talk about a new place,” she offers as they find boots and gloves sturdy enough for their task. Outside, flurries are already dancing on the breeze.

“Maybe we should stay here for a while,” Mulder says. “I don’t think they’d expect that at this point. We can just hole up.”

“A fox in his den,” she says with a smile.

“A fox and his vixen,” he says, winking at her. Absurdly, she blushes.

This isn’t resolved, but they will be safe and warm until the storm has passed. She has had less in her life.


	8. Strings

They are bound to each other. She sees it in her dreams like strings: wool and silk, hemp and nylon, humming between them with a resonance she knows in her bones. Maybe those glowing bugs have finally caught up to them and wrapped them in a cocoon. Maybe it’s the logical extension of string theory. Everything in the universe twangs together, and they dance to its tune, strung together like marionettes.

Maybe that’s why they can never truly take him from her. Like Ariadne, she has knotted his fate to hers with a golden thread as they maneuver blindly through a labyrinth of sinister design. Mulder, right-brained, always takes the left-hand turn. They have found untold horrors at the center but always (so far) raveled their way back to each other, skeining up the connection between them until it wraps around their wrists like a handfasting. The thing between them has frayed from time to time, one strand at a time, but the bonds have never broken. They have braided their lives together and made a cord too strong to snap. Their son is the coil of that rope, woven tight and true and fine, stretching out from them off the edge of the map. She feels that vibration too. Tug once if you’re okay. Tug twice for a question. Tug three times for danger. She would feel it in her belly, she thinks, if Willliam called for her.

Silk in the ties he used to wear, and in the long underwear they wear to bed on the coldest nights. Wool in the socks that ward away frostbite, here in the mountains. Nylon in their windproof gloves. Hemp in the rope strung from the cabin porch down the hill through the trees, all the way to the mailbox and back. Their life is new, but the strings are all the same.


	9. Glide

It snows, more than she’s seen in a long time, and they stay indoors all day, reading and talking and watching old movies. Scully tends to the hydroponic garden and slow-simmers apples for applesauce. Mulder follows through on his promise and teachers her how to make latkes. The whole house is filled with the warm scent of apples and potatoes.

They enjoy each other late into the night, generating more heat than the little radiator. In the morning, the snow is frozen over, dry and crisp. Mulder tromps out into the snow and comes back with a grin and a sled, one of the long plastic ones that’s big enough for two. 

“Should we?” he asks.

“Mulder, I can’t believe you’d even ask that,” Scully says, crossing her arms. 

For a moment, his face falls, and then she relents. “Because the answer is obvious,” she goes on, “we absolutely should.”

They go out into the winter world with its knife edges, protected by their puffy coats and their sunglasses. Mulder drags the sled and gallops through the drifts like a child, crunching as he goes. She follows behind, stretching her legs to step in his footsteps. The rest of the surface is smooth, marred only by deer tracks and the flurry of feathers where the birds dove for berries lofting above the snow.

Scully braces herself between Mulder’s knees and they push off. He wraps his arms around her. The hill the cabin is built on is steep; they start out slowly, but gain speed quickly, flying across the driveway and through a path in the trees. There’s no good way to steer; leaning helps, but it isn’t particularly effective. Scully doesn’t care though she knows she should. Any number of things could happen to them on this sled: concussion, broken bones, breath knocked out. None of it matters in the moment. They are as close as she will ever get to flying under her own power, whipping through the woods on a way made smooth for them, for once.

She finds herself whooping,and Mulder hollers behind her, and the birds startle away from them. They slide all the way to the end of the driveway, the wind whipping past them. Mulder nearly crashes them into the mailbox. Scully laughs until she falls into the snow. Mulder clears the powder out of the hood of her jacket and rights the sled as Scully checks the mail. They don’t open it, but she’ll put it in a bin when they get back. There’s nothing addressed to them, of course, or even to their pseudonyms, but they keep it all together. She tucks it into a pocket as Mulder drags the sled back up the driveway. 

“Again?” he asks. 

She sets the mail at the edge of the porch. 

“Take me flying, Mulder,” she says.


	10. autumnwinter

For the inktober prompt seasons

It didn’t feel like fall. Fall was fifty degree nights if she was lucky, and leaves spiraling gently off the trees into the Potomac. Fall in Montana was fifty degree days if she was lucky, with freezing nights and trees already bare. Maybe she’d missed the week of what she would have considered autumn, lost it to the dog days of September when they were still baking in Texas and she once bought an ice cold bottled Coke just to hold against her pulse points.

It set her off-kilter, the way summer had slammed into winter, instead of easing back and forth between humid and hazy, smothering and invigorating. It took thought to reach for clothes appropriate to the actual weather rather than her conception of the season. Montana wasn’t pumpkin spice and decorative scarves. Montana was snow boots, baked potatoes with extra chili, and coats rated to -20. “You know that’s not going to do you for the winter,” the clerk at the store had said dubiously, and Mulder had made his skeptical face. 

“We’re just visiting for a few weeks,” she’d said, and she’d paid and they’d left.

“How much worse can it get?” Mulder had asked.

“I hate when you say things like that,” she’d sighed, and leaned into him as he slipped his arm around her.

There would be no jack o’lanterns, no trick or treating. It was too cold for bonfires or corn mazes. It snowed and melted off every few days; even clear days were freezing at best and muddy at worst. The closest she would get to a haunted house was the way the cabin’s wooden floors sighed at night, as if she hadn’t had enough ghosts in her life already. She hadn’t celebrated much of Halloween, but she’d always seen it in the stores: fake gravestones, Martha Stewart’s best tips for turning one’s spotless house into a simulated abattoir, witches and zombies and cheap chocolate. Children. She would miss the children in their costumes, their faces shining behind plastic masks.

She bought candles with flavors like falling leaves and pumpkin chai and lit them as she read. It helped, although she could still smell the snow outside. It fit, somehow. She and Mulder were in limbo, just as the seasons were, suspended outside of the norm. But here was the cabin. Here was the snow. There were people who lived like this, for whom her mild autumn sunsets would feel out of season. 

“It feels like we changed gears too fast,” Mulder said once, blowing out her candle as he leaned over her chair.

“It does,” she said, turning and wrapping her arms around him, laying her cheek against his belly. “And it doesn’t.”


	11. Honed

She was surprised, stripping down for a shower, to see definition in her arms and legs. There was a lot of activity in her day to day life: hiking the fence, chopping wood, breaking paths through the snow when it got too deep. She hadn’t though of it as exercise precisely, because it wasn’t a run and it wasn’t the gym, but she was getting stronger. Despite the change in her diet from salads to pot roast, she was as lean as she’d been in the city. 

Honed. The word popped into her head unbidden. She and Mulder were always rubbing up against the world, and the friction of it had made her sharper. She had quicker instincts and more suspicions, firmer muscles and less hesitation. She had never considered herself a fighter, but the Bureau had changed her. She no longer pulled her punches. She would not have anything else taken from her.

Mulder walked into the bathroom to brush his teeth and put his arms around her from behind, resting his chin on her shoulder.

“Looking good, Scully,” he said.

She considered herself in the mirror: stretch marks from her pregnancy, bullet scar from one of the times she’d nearly died, a bruise or two, and the new faint lines of her strength. 

“Life certainly has left its mark,” she said wryly.

“That’s what makes you a masterpiece,” he said, kissing her neck. 

“I’m glad you think so,” she said, "the feeling is mutual.” She tugged him into the shower with her, the two of them stripping off his clothes as they went, and they paged through their history, one caress at a time.


	12. Foolish

I got literally none prompts for the meme, so here’s some more cabinfic.

She wakes up early on his birthday to make biscuits and gravy. She rolls over, extricating herself gently from his embrace, and gazes at him for a long moment. Twenty years and she’s still giddy about him. The way he breathes rasps at her heart. There is no sound more reassuring than the murmur of his body at rest. They are still here. They are both still here. She kisses his forehead and slips out of bed. 

She makes her mother’s biscuits and her grandmother’s gravy, flecked with sausage and pepper. She rolls out the dough this time and cuts perfect circles, rolling the ends of the dough together until it all comes out even. Whoever owns this cabin likes to cook. She likes learning these little things about them, though she feels more archaeological than investigatory. They have a vegetable peeler; they like vegetables. They have a set of cheese knives that look like they’ve never been used. There’s an ice cream machine in a cabinet. It doesn’t put a face on the shadow that lives just out of sight, but it helps the place feel more like a home.

While the biscuits bake and the gravy bubbles, she sifts and measures and stirs up a cake. Mulder has a weakness for chocolate and for cream cheese frosting. She makes the most decadent recipe she can find. She researched on their slow satellite internet for a week to find the most ridiculous cake and went into town herself for the ingredients. 

The happy housewife is not her role in life, but she is enjoying playing it, in a limited run. She thinks he is happy as her counterpart, sharing the domestic work and peering into the oven to check on his pot roast. During this retreat from themselves, they are rediscovering talents they thought they had forgotten or never knew they had. Perhaps it’s more of a reincarnation than a retreat. She does not feel as if she has lost. Instead, today, she feels victorious, giddy. She brushes hair out of her face and she can feel the streak of flour across her cheek. Her reflection in the window looks foolish, grinning at itself, a portrait she might not have recognized a year ago.

“You remembered my birthday,” Mulder says, shuffling into the kitchen. There’s a note of astonishment in his voice, even after all these years. She has never forgotten his birthday. She has never neglected to celebrate him.

“I hope you’ll return the favor,” she says, using her new strength to coax the too-firm cream cheese to blend with the powdered sugar. It doesn’t get warm enough in the house to soften completely. She should have put it in the pocket of her robe. 

“I will,” he vows, and kisses her good morning.

They have something precious here. There is the promise of a blue sky and a life something like what she wanted, once upon a time, before what she wanted was Mulder. For a while, they get to live in this liminal space, between mountains and sky, between reality and dream. The trees shade down from the slopes into the fields, creating spaces where different creatures flourish; they shape domestic ecosystems for themselves as if they have always been a couple, always negotiated the occupied territory between them. In a way they have, she things, pouring batter into the pans that Mulder floured for her. In the cabin, they are living a truth, one strand of an infinite universe woven from a trillion potential truths. How many times will they rise from their own ashes? How many times will they burn themselves to the ground, an immolation of holy fire, a sacrifice beyond counting? 

Like the cat in the box, she never knows if her life contains poison. She goes forth as if it does not. She is and isn’t a mother. She is and isn’t a seeker of truth. She is and isn’t Mulder’s one true passion. She is and isn’t a dutiful daughter, sister, partner, friend. The certainty she has is centered in herself: she knows what she has been through, and what she has to celebrate.

And there is Mulder, the creases around his eyes half laugh lines and half crows feet from decades of squinting anxiously into the shadows, his chest hair going grey where it peeks out of his Henley long underwear. Her heart lifts, flips, goes over like a swallow on a summer afternoon. There are things she can still be foolish about. She cherishes that and she cherishes him. They have made it, struggled out of their mire of conspiracy to some small island of solid ground where they can be silly about each other, and luxuriate in it.

“Happy birthday,” she says. “I won’t sing.”

“And I was going to get out the karaoke machine,” he jokes. 

They put the cake in the oven together, taking out the biscuits as they go, working in wordless synchronicity, and she closes her eyes against the swell of her own happiness, so hard won, and yet, she fears, so little deserved. She will take it and hold it, a wild bird in the hand, a miracle with a thudding heart.


	13. For The Stars To Align

She puts a hand on his shoulder. “We can’t give up, Mulder. Not now. Not after all of this.”

He glares at the screen of his laptop. “They’re lying, Scully. They’re covering up all the evidence. They’re turning us into terrorists.”

“The true measure of patriotism,” she murmurs. “Will you stand by your country when they don’t stand by you? My father used to say that once in a while.”

“I can’t find our son,” Mulder says, turning in his chair to face her. 

“You haven’t found him yet,” she corrects. “Mulder, it isn’t like you to give up so easily, even on something I’ve asked you to let go.”

He pushes his hands roughly through his hair, distracted, worried. “We’ve lost so many people,” he says, his voice hoarse and low. “I just can’t lose anyone else.”

She thinks of the ghosts they carry with them: in the backseat of the SUV, in the living room before the lights come on, in the corner of her eye at night sometimes. Her father, his father, Missy, her mother. Samantha. Frohike and Langly and Byers. Krycek. Deep Throat and Mr. X. Pendrell. Emily. Detective Ryan. Marita, probably. Spender, in a way. Max. Penny and the women in Allentown. Diana. They are haunted by sacrifice and by failure. They have never been able to save the ones they love from this cabal of sinister men and their alien allies, or enemies, or grudging colleagues. They haven’t even kept each other out of the jaws of that trap. No wonder she feels heavy, some days. No wonder he slumps now in his chair, with the weight of all those loves around his neck.

“He isn’t lost,” she says. “He’s safe. If you can’t find him, that means we’ve done it right.”

“We?” he asks bitterly.

“We’ll find him,” she says, ignoring him but not the pang that shoots through her. “One day, when the time is right, we’ll find him. Or he’ll find us.”

“I’m tired of waiting for the stars to align,” he says.

“I know,” she tells him. “I know.”

No syzygy can save them. She knows it, but she won’t stop trying to nudge the cosmos into a favorable position. She packs a lunch for him and sends him out to hike the fence. The fresh air will do him good. She will keep the ghosts with her, listening to them speak in empty rooms, feeling the absence of them as she turns around. Every house she keeps is haunted. She has learned, by now, how to live with ghosts.


	14. intimacy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rated R for consensual sexual situations.

Something about the cold makes every touch seem even more intimate. They tease apart each other’s layers, easing fingertips under hemlines and loosening fabric from heated skin one inch at a time. She is intensely aware of the differences in the ways the fibers hold warmth: wool, cotton, polyester, silk, and nylon all feel different as Mulder lifts them away. The cold air caresses her, scratching its icy fingernails down her spine. She shivers with need and with the chill. 

“You all right?” Mulder asks, his lips against her neck.

“Never better,” she breathes, drawing the blankets over them both. 

His skin is so smooth when she touches him. A consequence of exposing as little as possible to the wind and sun, she thinks, and of the way the dry air has them both moisturizing. He smells faintly of olive oil and sage from the lotion bar they bought at the farmer’s market. She kisses her way down his sternum, through the sparse covering of chest hair, along the faint swell of his stomach, softer than it used to be. He kneads his knuckles down the long muscles of her back and she arches into his touch as she straddles him. 

They take advantage of these moments. It’s as if the cold makes them more aware of each other, or as if they want to make the discomfort worthwhile. They explore each other’s bodies in a leisurely way, as if they haven’t mapped the territory years ago. His tongue flicks against her clit. She strokes his balls with her fingertips until they tighten and he shivers. She is still discovering new things about him, despite it all, cataloguing him down to the molecular level.

They create their own oasis under the down comforter. She realizes how little she sweats here, when she isn’t out hiking, as their skin becomes slick. Desire is excretory, in its way: it seeps out her pores, drips from between her folds as he thrusts into her. They cross all of each other’s boundaries, slip past each other’s barriers, saliva and sweat and the occasional drop of blood mingling. Given her training, her knowledge, it should disgust her. She should want to swath them both in latex. But there is no prophylactic for Mulder. She has always wanted him this way, wanted nothing between them. She has wanted to fuck him so hard their souls merge, as ridiculously sentimental as it sounds. She settles for the friction of her skin against his, the melding of minds, the way they push into and against each other. She has feared this kind of intimacy all of her life in case it lead to the loss of herself. She does not fear Mulder. 

He is firm inside her hand, her mouth, her cunt. She is open for him, welcoming, wet. She takes him as deep as she can, until their bones grind against each other. She remembers the skeletons in the ghost house, in the field on Brown Mountain. She wants that for them, to be together forever. In the moments she comes, in the moments he gasps out her name, they are there, tangled inextricably together, inseparable despite it all.

Overheated, he throws off the blanket, and she lies against the length of him, the two of them radiant, exhausted and refreshed.


	15. all awash with angels

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The poet Richard Wilbur died, so I took the title from one of his poems, [Love Calls Us To The Things Of This World](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43048/love-calls-us-to-the-things-of-this-world). tw: rape metaphor (only in the poem, not in the story)

After the cold and the snow, there’s a string of warm days. 65 feels like summer. The fields and the slopes are soggy. Scully doesn’t want to slip again in the mud. She takes a day off from walking the fence. She and Mulder do laundry, washing all the chill out of the things that it was too cold to do without. They hang the clothes outside on the rope that runs to the mailbox, yards and yards of yellow nylon strong between the trees at chest height, in case of catastrophe. There is no chance of blizzards today, and the same chance as most other days that the Yellowstone supervolcano will go up and take the sun with it. They trust the breeze and the light and air out all of their things.

Oh, let there be nothing on earth but clean laundry, she thinks, some fragment of poetry resurfacing from the depths of her memory. There was more to it, she knows, but that’s all she can remember, sheets billowing like angels. The sheets from their bed don’t billow as she pins them up. They’re soggy, clinging to her bare arms. She hasn’t hung sheets outside in years, or any laundry. Anything she had in DC was dry clean only or picked specifically to be wash and wear. She hadn’t had time for this ritual there.

Mulder helps her pull the wrinkles out of the sheets. He hangs up the wool sweaters she was too reluctant to wash, afraid they would shrink or felt. Even so, her hands and Mulder’s smell of wet wool. 

The breeze blows past, mild and earthy. It pulls tendrils from her ponytail and flattens Mulder’s t-shirt against his body. The sheets waver limply. The laundry and her heart alike are coaxed into motion by the sun and the wind and the sheer miracle of a warm October day. She knows by the end of the day, they will fly.


	16. Jubilant

There were moments, out in the middle of nowhere, when joy bubbled up in her despite everything. Despite the loss of her son, despite the loss of her home, despite their life on the run, she was happy. They had cobbled together an ersatz domesticity. She had learned to be part of a family and Mulder hadn't, but they muddled along together.

There were moments in the cabin when she felt like they had woven themselves a wholecloth life out of the frayed loose ends they'd salvaged. Only moments, but they were enough to sustain her. They always had been.


	17. fallow

For the inktober prompt “waiting”.

She thinks of planting a garden. Not the garden in the basement that grows lettuce and cucumbers and tomatoes and herbs and tomatoes and, she has discovered, fish, which makes it aquaponic instead of hydroponic. She doesn’t know how she missed the fish at first, but she has had little acquaintance with agriculture, aside from her term with Mulder investigating fertilizer. It doesn’t seem like the solar array should be able to provide enough power for the lights and the filters and all the rest of it, but she assumes there’s always more going on than she’s aware of with Mulder’s contacts.

Now between the rest of the ways she occupies her day, she reads articles on building a garden and the best time to plant bulbs. Mid-October isn’t the ideal time to plant, she learns, unless she wants to seed garlic and rhubarb. Well. She hasn’t done much in her life at the right time, and her life is more or less in order, more or less in bloom, more or less fruitful. The warm weather has her heart as soft and open as a plowed field. She would rather take the risk, even for one poisonous stalk of rhubarb or one stunted crocus. Something to bring the spring. Something to remind winter that it ends.

Once, in town, as they’re making a rare trip to the store, she and Mulder are walking down the sidewalk hand in hand. The block is scattered with walnut trees; the sidewalk is smeared with the fallen fruits, green and black and whole and shattered. Children have been playing with them. There is a message scrawled across the concrete with walnut ink: hAppy Halloweeen. 

Something about it breaks her heart.

“Let’s plant a garden,” she says.

“We won’t be here to see it,” he reminds her, as if she doesn’t know.

“It’ll be something, when we’re gone,” she says.

He squeezes her hand. “How do you feel about tulips?”

“Is that a joke?” She squints up at him.

“No!” he protests. “I like tulips. Mom had a yard full of them when I was little. Dutch roots.”

“I like your two lips,” she says. “Maybe we can find the speckled ones.”

“Sounds good,” he tells her, and they walked on through the neighborhood, to the small downtown with its one diner and its one hardware store, where they would invest in their future.


	18. Nature

She is restless, even as she plots out her garden and plants it, even as she secures the boundaries of the property again. She catches herself staring out the window, wondering what’s beyond the boundaries of the fence, weighing the car keys in her hand. She wants to stay. She wants to go. It’s been weeks already. The freewheel inside of her spins, dissipating energy.

It’s her nature now, to feel that urge to move. She doesn’t know how she missed it, all these years, but in her own way, she’s as restless as Mulder. Maybe it was her Navy brat background - they moved from base to base just often enough to ease the itch of wanderlust. Perhaps she inherited it from Missy in some sort of sideways transference. Her sister’s last gift. Perhaps Mulder’s tapping fingers and roiling mind are contagious. She never has managed to build up an immunity to him. Perhaps it was a natural consequence of their Bureau-induced attempt to perfect perpetual motion. A moving target is harder to hit.

Digging up the softened earth helps for a few hours. Hiking further up the mountain on the faint trail of the road does too. Her favorite solution is dragging Mulder off to bed for a few hours, where he makes sure she’s much too exhausted to even think of going anywhere. But it’s always in the back of her mind.

They are more alike than she knew, she and Mulder.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, she dreamed of picket fences and of stability. Now she wonders how long she would have borne her happy ending. There is some unexpected sliver of wilderness inside her; it echoes in her subconscious like the cry of a loon across a lake at dusk, a little bit haunted and a little bit lovely. 

Maybe it would have been fine. Maybe she would have been the doting mother, the loving wife. Maybe the full moon would have glinted on her metaphorical fangs as she ran wild through the night, thirteen times a year. Maybe she would have thrown herself against the bars of the cage she built.

She hides the part of herself that is grateful that nothing has ever gone according to plan, and she plants her tulips and her garlic and her rhubarb and her crocuses. They’ll come up in the spring or they won’t. Either way, she won’t be there to witness any deviations from the expectation: red rhubarb with its toxic leaves, purple crocuses heralding spring, a riot of tulips in yellow and pink and white, the only kind of monument she wants anymore.


	19. wishes

It’s gotten cold again. The sky spits snow as she slips and slides along the boundary fence on freezing mud and slick leaves. She doesn’t fall this time. She’s gotten so sure-footed in the weeks they’ve been here. She knows things now: the shape of leaves against the clouds, the heft of ripe nuts inside their shells, the scent of the earth as she turned it over to tuck new life inside it. That’s the perfume of centuries, time building up into mountains and wearing away into soil. Trees have grown and died and become part of it, all the flowers and fruits. The earth holds the memory of all of them, and of all of the animals who have leapt and dug and brawled in the woods, and of all the people who have walked over it, cut into it, had picnics on it and planted gardens in it and fenced off bits of it.

She runs herself a bath when she gets back. Mulder is puttering around, accomplishing his own mysterious purposes, but he pauses to exclaim about her cold lips and help her fumbling fingers undo her various zippers and buttons. He wanders away again as she twists the taps and crumbles a bath bar (purchased from an industrious teenager at the farmer’s market) into the tub. The whole bathroom fills with steam and with the scent of rosemary and lavender. The tub fills with bubbles, froth lofting higher, wobbling as the surface ripples. The water stings her skin as she climbs into the tub, but between the snow and the wind, she’s cold to her bones. She sinks in up to her chin, listening to the white noise of bubbles popping.

The world contracts around her. There are no shadows. There are no monsters. There is only this, rosy hands in the rising steam, her skin flushed from heat. Her hair curls in tendrils around her face. The fiberglass of the tub is cool against her neck. The pressure of it anchors her as her body drifts. Time isn’t a universal invariant here. She is free.

Eventually she pushes herself up and lets the water drain away as she towels herself off and pulls on her softest, warmest clothes. They have a pot roast in the slow cooker. She has nowhere else she needs to be.

As she smooths her hair in the mirror, the herbal notes are overlaid by lemon and vanilla and sugar. She follows her nose to the kitchen. Mulder is taking a tray out of the oven. He lifts the edges of the parchment paper and shifts a perfect pale yellow sheet cake to a cooling rack.

“Happy unbirthday,” he says. “No Snoballs, so I thought I’d make you a swiss roll.” He gestures to a bowl of cream cheese filling and a jar of blueberry jam. “Some assembly required.”

“Mulder...” she says, and lets the way her voice melts around his name say it all.

“I missed your birthday,” he says. “I’m not going to miss the chance to make that up to you.” He reaches down for a tiny candle and strikes a match. The flame catches, the cheap wax already melting down the spiraling stripes. He holds out the candle to her between two fingers.

“Make a wish, Scully,” he says.

She closes her eyes and lets every unspoken hope fly free.


	20. unsubtantiated

She can feel that they’ll be leaving soon. Something in the water, maybe, or a tension in the air. 

“Mulder,” she says as she lies in his arms.

“Mm,” he says. The shorthand of a thousand hotel rooms as they nodded over case files. 

“There was a footprint,” she says. “In the woods.”

“Good place for it,” he mumbles against her bare shoulder.

“An unidentifiable footprint,” she says.

His stillness behind her is the frozen tableau of a hunting dog. How well she knows the feeling. Mulder, ready to slip his leash. Mulder, howling at the moon.

“Unidentifiable how?”

“As in, it couldn’t be identified as any native species,” she says. “Not according to my book.”

“Your book would know,” he says. His body idles behind her, rumbling with possiblitiy.

“I thought you might want to know,” she says. “Since you were a Guide.”

“I was,” he says. “We identified a lot of footprints. At least six.”

“I know it’s no Jersey Devil,” she says.

“Hold that thought until we see the footprint,” he says.

“The Jersey Devil is a human woman,” Scully argues. “I can identify a human footprint, Mulder.”

“The Mothmen didn’t have normal human footprints,” he bickers back, There must be some kind of record for a twenty-five year volley. 

“I’ll take you to it tomorrow,” she says. “The weather report said it should be warm enough to camp if we need to. Can you pitch a tent, Mulder?”

“In so many senses,” he tells her, nuzzling her neck. “I can’t wait to monster mash with you again, Scully.”

She makes her own version of the “mm”, bespoke indifference, but she smiles into the dark and curls closer to him.


	21. ascent

She shows him the footprint. It’s cuneiform, a message only Mulder can read. She has deciphered forgeries scrawled in ancient Greek and alien script etched into an alien ship, but she will never see the world quite the way he does. 

“It could be nothing,” he says.

“It could be,” she agrees.

He traces the outlines of the print with one fingertip without touching it.

“It might be something,” he says at last.

“It might be,” she agrees.

He looks up at her with jack o’ lantern light in his eyes. The last few years have hollowed him out, but the flame still burns, diminished but bright.

“You already got me a birthday present, Scully.”

She spreads her hands in feigned innocence. “I found a strange footprint. I thought you should know about it.” 

He straightens from his crouch, a reliquary unfolding. He winces as his knee creaks. They are older now, but there are still miracles inside them. He still has unfathomable depths. She catches the glint of his thoughts like coins scattered on the sea floor.

“One last monster mash?” he says wryly. One last nice trip to the forest. One last ride before they saddle up the SUV and ride out of town. 

“I thought you’d never ask,” she says.


	22. ascent II

There are climbing packs at the cabin, and in the basement, they find an elaborate tent.

“It’ll be cold up there, Scully,” Mulder says.

“It won’t be as cold as Antarctica,” she tells him. “And I heard a hot tip about sharing sleeping bags to keep warm.”

He grins, and for a moment, she glimpses the man she met in the basement, all mischief and melancholy. 

It is difficult even for her to encompass the whole of their history. There are moments that seem mythical or unreal: the bonewhite cold of Antarctica where they almost froze to death, entwined like two ancient lovers; the depths of the forests where they’ve found Mothmen and luminous doom; the rusty red of the desert where he almost died and was reborn among boughs of cedar; the etched skylines of cities that sheltered monstrous secrets.

Maybe one day they’ll write a memoir. _The Rise and Fall of the X-Files_ or _Curious True Tales of the Weird_ or _A Field Guide to North American Cryptids_. They would all be multivolume affairs, too bulky to pack along on a trip like this one. 

They pack as lightly as they can, but Scully refuses to be less than thorough. They have wet gear, dry clothes sealed in plastic, matches in a waterproof container, a water filter, a kerosene lantern and a battery-powered one. There are sleeping bags and pads for them. She rolls the sat phone into a scarf, just in case. They have more than enough food. Mulder, somewhere along the way, had bought camping rations. She packs them now: freezedried pasta, powdered stew, something that claims to be breakfast. ntScully makes sure there’s instant coffee, the best she can do unless she wants to boil it in the tiny saucepan. There are sandwiches for lunch, as if this were a picnic instead of a quest. Mulder carries the tent. She sees his spine straighten as he shoulders his pack.

One last monster mash. One last chance to be Mulder and Scully, seekers of truth and unravelers of mysteries. 

She has seen so much that she cannot name, even now. 

They hike past the familiar landmarks. She must have walked the fence twenty times now - not every day, but most days. It’s easy to walk in the woods now. She steps with an accustomed wariness, a low-level skepticism of her footing and her surroundings. Mulder crunches along beside her. They negotiate the wires of the fence, passing the bags over and contorting themselves through, and then they’re in new territory, beyond the boundary and breaking trail. For a while, they follow the faint ruts of what serves as a road. She doesn’t know who made it or how often they travel this way, but there are two paths worn away through the woods, tire-wide and truck-spaced. Mulder pauses once in a while to look at the ground or at some foliage. He must have been an excellent Guide: a serious boy, noticing every detail, cross-referencing it in that incredible mind of his. 

Up and up they go. She’s breathing fast, but not struggling, though the air is thinner than she’s used to. The pack is strapped tight to her body. She feels as if she could walk for weeks this way. They could walk off the map today, hike north until their resources and bodies are exhausted. This journey has tried to end her often enough. At least this would be on their terms. 

The sun is high and they eat sandwiches: turkey with cranberry mustard that was in the fridge when they arrived. She wonders if she would like the person whose home they’re borrowing. Something about it reminds her of the Lone Gunmen. For a moment, she mourns them all over again, gazing into the trees without seeing them. A wordless prayer stirs the leaves. When they begin again, her footsteps count off her own ersatz rosary: faith, hope, and sacrifice. Blessed are the ghosts that drift in their wake. Blessed are the lost and the found. 

They stop as the day dims to evening. They left the road behind hours ago. She let Mulder pick their path through the woods; she trusts his instincts. In a clearing cobbled with rocks, they pitch the tent, clearing a space and assembling it together, staking the corners down tight. Scully builds a pit for the fire out of the rocks as Mulder finds wood, and together they bank the branches and kindle the flame. There’s a stream. Scully fills the filter pouch with water and brings it back to boil at the edge of the fire. 

“Haute cuisine,” Mulder says when the food is reconstituted. 

She pretends to misunderstand him and blows exaggeratedly on her food. “Very haute,” she says solemnly, and he laughs. 

She would put that laugh in her _Field Guide to Fox Mulder_. The particular timbre of this chuckle is close to a guffaw: genuine amusement and relaxation.

“Think we’re going to find anything?” she asks at last, belly full of something that was chewier than stew ought to be.

He stirs the fire with a stick. “That’s the mystery, isn’t it?”

Sparks crackle up, becoming stars. The world is full of wonders not yet discovered and some part of her is restored. She didn’t know she needed there to be unknowns until Mulder, that she wanted to live on a map that said “here be monsters”. She didn’t know how much she craved the inexplicable. 

Somewhere, out in the woods, a creature picks its own path, or maybe it’s only the idea of the creature, some smudged shadow, some half-seen flicker of movement. The world is wider than she knows and that, somehow, is a comfort.

Mulder slips his arm around her and says nothing, but she hears. Together they gaze up at the sky, animate stardust calling out to the cosmos.


	23. ascent III

She boils more water, makes one hot toddy with the flask of whiskey and lemon that she packed. They pass it back and forth, half-reclined on the largest, flattest rock. Her body is loose, warm, brimming with the weary satisfaction of having done good work. 

“Do you think we’ll find something?” she asks, gazing into the fire. Mulder passes her the mug and she takes it without looking.

“I don’t know,” he muses. “I hear there’s sasquatch in these woods.”

“A reliable source tell you?” she asks, passing the toddy back.

“Something like that.” He sips. 

“The Jersey Devil,” Scully says. “I wonder what happened to her.”

“Maybe she’s the Montana Mountain Woman now,” he says. “Twenty years is enough time for an odyssey.”

“Theoretically,” she says, “twenty years should be enough for all of us to make it home.”

“She might be happier here than in Atlantic City,” he says. “I mean, look at this.” He waves his hand to encompass all of it: the stars, the trees, the crisp night air, the crackling sense of wonder that suffuses all of it. That is the thing she has never been able to explain. Around Mulder, she sees the world from a different angle, obliquely, with some sort of second sight. The things that they glimpse are not always wonderful, but they are almost always marvelous. Every horror and mutant is some proof of more in heaven and earth than she dreamt of before, in her philosophy. 

Even if they find nothing out of the ordinary, she has found this. How extraordinary to be on an adventure again with this man. They have sought, fruitfully and fruitlessly, for so much in their lives. What a miracle that they might find something. What a miracle that they are still seeking, after all these years, another marvel, proof positive. 

She wants the Jersey Devil to have become the Montana Mountain Woman. She wants something wild and free to have thrived in the interim while she and Mulder were fighting for survival. 

Under the dome of the heavens they sit and drink and talk and think and love each other, a little bit wild, a little bit free.


	24. ascent IV

They go to sleep whiskeywarm and satisfied. Mulder has brought one of the battery-powered cameras like the ones on the fence. He clips it to the top of the tent before he crawls inside and zips the flap shut. They have banked the fire, but the scent of woodsmoke lingers on their skin. Scully strips down to her long underwear, stuffing her clothes into the foot of the sleeping bag, and watches Mulder peel away his own layers. They have always been getting to the heart of each other. It’s nice to see a less metaphorical representation of every skin they’ve shed in their metamorphosis into this Mulder, this Scully, this partnership, this vigilante love.

They zip the sleeping bags together and lie in each other’s arms. Despite their best efforts, the ground is still too lumpy to be comfortable, but they caress each other and murmur back and forth, half-formed thoughts about wild things, cryptid research and rumor, how a Jersey Devil or a Bigfoot might survive in this environment, the potential for isolation, and the resources that the mountains produce.

They have been further from civilization, but she has never felt so much on the edge of things. There is an exultation in relying on their own wits, their own strength. Despite the borrowed equipment, she feels liberated. For all the oddities of Mulder’s network of contacts, she has always found them generous almost to a fault, freely sharing the information they’ve gleaned and the stores they’ve prepared.

Something rustles in the middle of the night, but she’s too deep in Mulder’s embrace to do more than blink, sigh, and nestle back against his chest, breathing in the warmth of him as her eyelashes catch on the weave of his thermal shirt. 

When they wake and dress and stretch to the extent the tent allows, frowsy with sleep and disheveled and staticky, she looks at him and feels a pang of pure, unadulterated happiness, the joy that cuts like a knife. After everything, she can still be happy, if mostly in moments like sudden beams of light on a cloudy day, Jacob’s ladders set against a backdrop of storms. She smiles at him and he beams back and unzips the tent flap. Cold air spills in, eddying around her feet and ankles, and she hastens to put on her boots.

Outside the tent there are footprints.


	25. ascent V

He steps out of the tent, balancing on one lanky leg like a heron to avoid disturbing the footprints. Scully watches, holding her breath. Mulder leans down, deciphering a code as enigmatic to her as Navajo. He bites at his lip and then slowly looks up at her.

The light in his eyes pulls her toward him, but it’s the same tug that hauls the water out of a harbor before a tidal wave. After an endless pilgrimage, Mohammed endlessly striving toward a mountain no one else could see, the mountain has come, in the form of an actual mountain morse-coded with strange prints of strange paws. 

“Scully,” he says, and his voice almost cracks. “Scully, look at this.”

She almost wishes she could say that she did this: found a suitable image, cast a mold, and slipped out of the sleeping bag in the middle of the night to stop around with an ersatz pair of feet. It would have been worth it for the joy that it’s brought him. But this is better. The truth is always a fine and precious thing: that’s been their code all along. Obediently she gazes into the shallow depressions. They’re roughly foot-shaped, not outside the range of ordinary, if large, foot size. There is a matted tuft of hair pressed into one of the toe marks. The prints patter here and there, a dashed line interrupted by the rocky ground. 

Whatever it was left their food alone in its tree and didn’t disturb the fire, although there are deeper prints in front of the pit, as if it crouched and warmed itself over the embers. 

“This has to be real,” he says. She runs through the litany of possibilities in her mind as he reels them off. “Who could have followed us up here? Nobody even knows we’re here, and nobody else lives within 50 miles in this direction. It’s protected land. There’s nothing living in this woods that could perpetrate a hoax like this. They had to have been made while we were asleep, because they cross our tracks and we would have noticed.” 

“Mulder,” she says, “this is incredible.”

“She found us,” he says. He beams, and it warms her like sunlight. “She found us.”

Automatically, Scully looks for the camera that was clipped to the tent. With their luck, it will be gone, and it is, but she sees it a moment later on the ground next to the tent. It has slipped off the slick nylon. She picks it up, turns it over in her hand. It appears undamaged. She offers it to Mulder, who takes it as reverently as if it were some saintly relic, a fragment of bone to pray over.

“This is it,” he says.

“You were right,” she says. “There was something out here.”

“Or someone,” he corrects. 

“I don’t even have an argument,” she says. “That footprint looks humanoid to me.”

He throws his arms out, the ecstasy of discovery overwhelming the both of them and crashing through the clearing. She’s astounded that the shock of it doesn’t disturb the ground or shake the trees.

“God, I needed this,” he says as if it’s a prayer, and she surprises herself by agreeing. 

Making coffee seems such a mundane act after such a revelation, but Scully goes to the creek for water anyway. That’s the part that Mulder has never been expert at: life going on. When she comes back and stirs the fire back to life, Mulder is stepping back and forth across the tracks, filming with the tiny camera. He follows the trail across the clearing, recreating the movements of whatever it was. He collects the hair in one of the plastic bags from yesterday’s sandwiches. Scully says nothing about contamination. Surely any test they manage to run can control for turkey and mustard. Surely there are no wheat-based monsters in the wilds of Montana.

By the time the coffee is ready, Mulder has finished gathering his evidence. He tucks the camera carefully into his pocket and joins Scully, sharing the coffee mug back and forth. She makes a second cup as he sorts through the freeze-dried food for breakfast-appropriate options, The existence of powdered eggs is in its way, no less stunning than the apparent existence of some sort of wood-dwelling humanoid, but much less exciting.

The world looks new, and it isn’t just the glinting edges of frost on the trees. There is something fresh in the air beyond the cold. Their journey toward the truth has no destination, but she feels they have reached some long-rumored waystation, some haven. 

“Bigfoot is real,” she murmurs to herself.

“We’ll print postcards,” he says. “Someday.”

“Welcome to Montana,” she says. “Home of the Mountain Woman.” 

“I saw the Montana Mountain Woman,” he counters.

“I walked a mile in the Montana Mountain Woman’s tracks,” she offers.

“There it is,” he says. “We’ll alert the press when we leave. Maybe they’ll rename the high school mascot after her.”

“Now that’s a legacy we can be proud of,” she says, and leans against him as the sun deglazes the forest.


	26. ascent VI

The morning is sliding into afternoon before they’re done cataloguing the footprints, taking images from various angles, measuring as best they can with what they’ve got. The shadows of the trees are already deepening into mystery when Scully looks up.

“I think we should stay another night,” she says.

Mulder checks the batteries on the camera. “Scully, that might be the most romantic thing you’ve ever said to me.”

She smiles. “I doubt we’d get far enough down the mountain before it gets dark. We’ve still got food.”

He taps his temple. “See? Latent psychic ability.”

“Mulder, there’s no reason latent psychic ability would manifest at your age.”

“Maybe it’s a symptom of my rebirth,” he says, and for a moment the pain in his eyes is deeper than the darkness under the trees. But only for a moment.

They spend the afternoon casting in circles around their campsite, but the Mountain Woman or the Jersey Devil or whatever has visited them moves through the forest without leaving much trace. Mulder tries to follow the track and winds up back at the campground. 

“I guess it’s just as well,” he says. “I don’t want to get lost in the woods tonight.”

“Maybe she’d escort you back,” Scully teases. “Everyone knows the forest is no place for a guy like you.”

“If I did go wild, it would be in a place like this,” he muses, setting down his pack. “Would you go wild with me, Scully?”

“According to the Bureau, we’re already feral,” she points out.

“I prefer untameable,” Mulder says. “I can’t be broken.”

She just smiles at the absurdity of a statement so fractured it reads a different way from every angle and pushes twigs into the fire pit. 

They fetch water and heat it, build up the fire, make lunch and then dinner in pouches. There’s still a nip of whiskey to share.

She crawls alone into their double sleeping bag. Mulder sits at the tent flap, still wearing his jacket. 

“Don’t stay up all night,” she says. “You’ll scare her off.”

“She’ll come,” he says with confidence.

She wakes up again in the middle of the night to a rustling noise, but it’s Mulder sliding in next to her, cool and warm in patches so that she murmurs a protest.

“Did you see her?”

“I think you were right,” he says. “I think she won’t come until we’re asleep.”

“Oh,” she says, and is drifting again, and she hears nothing else.


	27. ascent VII

Scully wakes up in the early morning. The tent glows like she’s underwater, rays of sunlight dissipating through the blue nylon. She eases the stiffness out of her muscles and slips out of the sleeping back into the cold. She can smell woodsmoke in her hair and the faint aroma of her own sweat on her skin as she dresses in the clothes from two days ago. It’s oddly comforting. The fabric sits against her skin now like she’s always worn these things. She folds the roll of toilet paper into her jacket pocket and goes to find a convenient tree. She unzips the flap of the tent and clambers out, sealing Mulder back into the seawater belly of it. 

When she looks out across the clearing there’s a mane of tangled hair in the trees. She thinks it’s a shrub at first, or some thicket of bramble, but then it blinks, and she sees that the pale oval is a face, not a sunbeam falling in just the right way through the leaves, and that the shadows delineate arms, legs, the long span of a back.

As soon as she takes in all of this, the creature - the mountain woman, the sasquatch, whatever she is - is gone.

“Mulder,” she says faintly, but it isn’t worth waking him. Besides, some part of her wants this moment to herself. He has been the sole witness to so many of these incidents or phenomena or tall tales. She holds this one inside her, cupped like a robin’s egg, fragile and beautiful. She has endured many miracles, but this - this is some other magic. And she was witness to it.

She takes care of the things she needs to do behind a tree and washes her hands in the creek before she gets water and boils it for coffee. These mundane things, the ordinary tasks of percolating and stirring, seem both special and frustratingly quotidian. No wonder Mulder always fumed and bubbled over after a case. 

There have been other moments like this in her life, but never one that was only hers, as clear as this, as lovely as this. This morning, she wasn’t in peril. She didn’t fear the mountain woman or whoever that was under the thicket of hair, in the cover of the trees. They shared something, she and the mountain woman. She has rarely communicated with any of Mulder’s unlikely beasts in any way she’s cared to remember. She’ll remember this one: the light, the shape of her, the stillness, the sudden recognition. 

Behind her is the noise of a zipper and Mulder stumbles out of the tent, a rangy hound scenting for coffee. She pushes the toilet paper into his hand and he crunches away into the underbrush. When he comes back, he accepts the mug of coffee and gazes around the clearing.

“Nothing new?” he says, and it’s only half a question.

“Nothing around the tent,” she says. 

“Huh,” he says, casting about. 

“Mulder,” she says slowly, “I saw her.”

“What?”

“I saw her,” she says. “The mountain woman.” She points. “She was there, just under the trees.”

“That’s amazing,” he says, already moving toward the spot. She watches him cast back and forth, but he doesn’t seem to find what he’s looking for. Scully sips at the weak coffee and lets the sunlight play over her skin.

“She knows how to hide herself,” he says, coming back to her. “A couple of broken twigs, a few crushed leaves. You’d never know she was here.”

“But she was,” Scully says simply.

“I believe you,” he says.

They disassemble the campsite after breakfast, soaking the ashes of the campfire and packing all the bits of equipment away in their neat packages. It’s easier going down the mountain. They make good time, skidding down the occasional slope and slipping easily through the fence. The cabin is a welcome sight. She’s ready for a shower and a meal that isn’t reconstituted.

The next morning she makes coffee in a machine, toasts bread in the oven. She can feel herself pacing the same grooves of her routine, making her circuit of the kitchen and the living room. Mulder comes in yawning and makes eggs for himself. She sits at the table with her coffee and her toast and her local butter and jam, watching him perform his part of their version of domesticity. Winter is coming and they should move on. She knows it’s dangerous to stay too long in one place. Even as off the grid as they are, they might be found. Still, as they begins to sort through the chaff they’ve acquired, paring back down to essentials, she thinks of the mountain woman. She has felt at home here, and somehow the mountain woman is part of that, a running thread that ties her to their former life. 

She sees the woman again in her mind’s eye: wild, free, perfectly suited to her environment in a way Scully may never be again, or maybe never was. But in that moment, they were one thing, part of the same thing, the weft and warp of a universe woven through with glittering threads of possibility, of potentiality and perfection. 

Despite the odds, she has been happy in this cabin. Despite the odds, she will be happy elsewhere, with Mulder, in a world where a beastwoman and her son can exist somewhere outside of Scully’s normal range of perception. The poem from days ago comes back to her: they will float on in their dark habits, keeping their difficult balance, and the unknown will sustain her as it has for years.

“I love you,” she says to Mulder’s back.

“I love you too,” he says into his pan of eggs. “What prompted this spontaneous declaration?”

“I thought I’d put one more mystery in your life,” she says and picks up a book that isn’t worth keeping.


	28. epitaph

If it wasn't happily ever after, it was, at least, happily for a while.


End file.
